COLUMN: IT’S A BIRD, IT’S A PLANE … NO IT’S A DRONE by John P. Flannery

Just when you stopped being surprised about black helicopters flying East and West to and from Mount Weather, we have Drones (unmanned aircraft) in America, one crashing to the ground in Northern Virginia recently, so we know they are no longer just in the Mid-East seeking out and blowing up terrorist targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Yemen; they’re also here surveilling us.

Drone-mania started in the Bush White House and continued, as enthusiastically, in the Obama White House.  These flying drones can stay aloft for sixteen hours, controlled by radio signals via satellite to the theater of war 8,000 miles from Nevada where the pilot sits, before a video screen, manipulating “game controls,” from what looks like a portable ship container, relying on live-feed super high resolution video, with ready real destructive power, Hellfire missiles and bombs.

Indeed, every Tuesday, at the weekly counterterrorism meeting, attended by a phalanx of our national security apparatus, drone targets on cards and in PowerPoint presentations are designated in a ghoulish “whack a mole” ritual.  The process is somewhat suspect insofar as we pay $5,000 in bounty for intelligence from local nationals to inform us who the “real” terrorists are.  At least, this has simplified the Guantanamo detention question as to taking any more prisoners.  

Our government has defined away the killing of “innocent bystanders.”  “Combatants,” by official definition, are any “military age males in a strike zone …unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”  A “posthumous” judgment of innocence is awfully Alice in Wonderlandish and disserves our avowed counter insurgency initiatives in Pakistan and Yemen when we rain down Hellfire missiles transporting innocent nationals to Allah.

When we killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, hiding in Yemen, with a drone, we also killed Samir Khan, another American who was with him but not on the “whack a mole” list.

There has been alleged disparity in our government’s reports – that our targeted kills are overstated and the innocent dead are grossly understated.  U.S. Officials on different occasions say we’ve killed “over 20,” then “closer to 50,” finally conceding they really couldn’t say how many. 

Another dangerous genie has escaped.  Our drones manufacturers are selling them overseas to other governments.  

Closer to home, we shall be awash in some 15,000 drones in the United States by 2018.

Public Intelligence, a non-profit, has released a map that shows more than 60 bases in the United States with drone activity.  http://publicintelligence.net/dod-us-drone-activities-map/

 

There are 50 companies, universities and government organizations producing and developing 155 unmanned aircraft designs.  The FAA has recently disclosed all the public and private entities that have asked to fly drones in the United States.  https://www.eff.org/document/faa-list-special-airworthiness-certificates-experimental-categorysacs

 

State and county governments want these drones to view, record and tape what we do and say. 

Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell can’t get our drones quickly enough; Fairfax County’s Police Chief, David Rohrer, proclaimed he wants to use them “in this region…”

We have to be on guard for privacy violations.  Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) proposed a bill to outlaw the use of drones in the United States without a warrant approved by the court.  That’s a good start.  The Supreme Court in Kyllo v. United States found unlawful any warrantless search of a home conducted from outside the home using thermal imaging.  In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court objected to a warrantless GPS attached to a car for 24/7 surveillance.  This trend may favor further protection for any expectation of privacy from drones hovering above us, dodging black helicoptors.

If you are interested in self-defense, you may want your own more reasonably priced drone operated from your iPad or smart phone (a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 Quadricoptor)(for $300) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqkklVI7WBo&feature=youtube_gdata_player ) in order to watch the government watch you, or to broadcast a birds-eye view of your next political demonstration, perhaps to bust the errant cop compromising someone’s First Amendment rights, or, if you are unsavory, to catch your neighbor sunbathing.

The bottom line is that our public dialogue is arid when we fail to object to how we use drones to kill innocents abroad, export them too freely to other nation-states, and allow them to invade our privacy without our express knowledge or consent.

GAZETTE COLUMN: THE SUPREME COURT SAYS NO TO BIG BROTHER by John P. Flannery

            When I was a law student in 1972, a bunch of us wrote and solicited articles that we published about the horrors of the government invading our individual right to be let alone; it was all about government surveillance and the right of privacy.

            The best part was a meeting with Senator Sam Ervin from North Carolina who agreed to write an article for our publication, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review; this was before the nation knew Senator Ervin as the Chair of the Senate Watergate hearings. 

The Senator was concerned in 1972 about the “insatiable curiosity of the government to know everything about those it governs.”  He said, “Some agencies take the attitude that the information belongs to them and the last person who should see it is the individual whom it is about.”  At the time, “Army agents were sent throughout the country to keep surveillance over the way the civilian population expressed their sentiments about government policies.” 

Our article on remote camera systems for surveillance of public streets seems quaint when you consider “modern” technology.  Thanks to Justice Department funding, Mt. Vernon had installed in 1971 low light TV cameras from Sylvania that could rotate 355 degrees in a horizontal plane and 120 degrees in a vertical plane; they could read a license plate or see a face ½ mile away, and could take photographs even through store or apartment windows.

George Orwell’s dystopian Novel, 1984, included telescreens by the ruling party of Oceania, monitored by the thought police, to watch its subjects, supposedly so they could stop any chance of secret conspiracies against the government.

If we fast forward to the present, we have the biggest, “baddest” computing power in the world, as well as the Internet with its digital back alleys, GPS satellites, thermography, electronic bugs, and all manner of possibly intrusive devices that may infringe upon our privacy.  In order to bank, phone, and transact business online, we surrender private information for good reason that can be used for wrong and unconsented purposes.  Private Telecomm carriers reportedly are cooperating with the government to collect and analyze data about all of us.

There is encouraging news, however, that the supreme law of the land still favors our individual privacy.  Last week, the Supreme Court curbed the government’s excessive reliance on GPS surveillance techniques – and made some significant observations about hi-tech devices that threaten to hi-jack our privacy.

In the case that was decided, the government placed a tracking device on Antoine Jones’ Jeep Grand Cherokee for four weeks without a valid warrant.  The government knew within 50-100 feet where Jones was 24/7 and generated 2,000 pages of personal data about his personal activities.

Justice Scalia, writing for the Court, said the Fourth Amendment guaranteed each individual the right “to be secure” in his person, house, paper and “effects” and a “vehicle” was an “effect” that was impermissibly searched by this GPS monitoring technique.

Justice Sotomayor said that we are not only protected against trespass of our “effects” but also violations of our “reasonable expectation of privacy.”  She charged that this e-surveillance “chills associational and expressive freedoms” and is “susceptible to abuse” and “inimical to democratic society.” 

Sotomayor expressed the concern that we are going to have to re-visit how we handle abuses of the information that we disclose to third parties for one purpose that is abused for different purposes and that includes the phone numbers we dial, the text messages we send, the urls we visit, the e-mails we write and receive, and the online purchases of books, groceries and medications. 

Justice Alito joined the chorus of concern with a somewhat different analysis but focused as well on how “closed-circuit television video monitoring is becoming ubiquitous” on toll roads and elsewhere.

While this decision is a hopeful sign that we may still have some right of privacy, we are going to have to be vigilant.

By the way, does anyone know what those cameras at the traffic stop in Leesburg on East Market Street are capturing – they appear to be on 24/7?